Encoding flac with xbmc

Question

Hi,
I'm having a unique issue, maybe someone knows how to resolve it. 
I'm using xbmc to encode whole audio CD's into flac files.  I've been slowly working through my collection when I noticed some flac files are huge, around 150 gigabytes in size.  The average 5 minute music track should result in a flac file 25 to 35 megabytes in size.  What's wierd is that they play fine.  For a 5 minute audio track, it shouldn't be 150 gigabytes in size.  Also I've noticed although it's shown as 150 gigabytes in size (from both the commandline and filemanager), it doesn't actually take up that space on my hard drive.  I can copy the file from the commandline to another drive and it takes just a few seconds.
I'm guessing here, but somehow during the encoding process the encoder stored the wrong file size, or gave the wrong information to the filesystem?  I've dismouted the drive, and forced a fsck on it.  No problems found, and after mounting the disk again, the large flac files are still the same size.
Has anyone else experienced this behaviour with either xbmc encoding flac (or ogg / mp3) files, or, using faac from the commandline to encode wav files?
Jacob
using: xbmc 10.1-1 from Community

Answer 1

.:B:. wrote:
I read your report 'totally' . You didn't mention what file system you were using, so it was worth a guess (just like it would have been worth mentioning in your opening post, since you obviously tested it but left us in the dark about that ). So yes, it pretends to be 150 GB large, but it's not taking up that space. There is a discrepancy there that has to be accounted for somewhere, and that's exactly what seems to be happening to some btrfs users - albeit not that large. I haven't seen Ext4 to exhibit that kind of problems, or JFS, or XFS, so that probably leaves Xbmc indeed. Maybe it is allocating space but not using it?
Is there a particular reason why you are using Xbmc? There are tools like Grip/Rubyripper (and even EAC through Wine, a de facto standard) to rip your music. Does Xbmc support the same features those dedicated ripping utilities do? E.g. online and offline integrity verification of the resulting FLAC/WAV file?
My suggestion would be to ditch Xbmc for the ripping and use one of the specialised programs. If you really want to get to the bottom of this you should check on the Xbmc forum or in their #xbmc-linux IRC channel, or even open a ticket on their bugtracker.
As for your posting in the other subforum, please read the description of the forum where you originally posted in:
A place for true innovation. Share your own created utilities with the Arch community.
Hi, I didn't believe the filesystem was the issue, so I didn't put that information in, my mistake not to have posted results which didn't happen to be the issue. 
The reason I am using XBMC is simple.  I am creating a media center for a friend who's never used Linux before (barely uses a computer), and I wanted the simplicity of an all-on-one program.  From my days as a teacher, I can say that if someone isn't familiar with a computer, asking them to learn a few different programs is harder than mastering just one.  So, in that regard XBMC is a specialised program, and I cannot find a better / more supported media center program.  But I digress my reasons for choosing XBMC don't play a part in determining the problem I am faced with.
If it was a matter of integrity checking, flac files store their md5 sum inside.  If the sum is off the player will refuse to play the file, it would give error.  Also, decoding the flac file to a wav file would fail.  This is not the case, as the huge flac files both play and decode to proper sized wav files.  So something is a miss with xbmc's flac creation mechanism, and I'm trying to determine if I'm either missing a dependency or if there is a problem with Arch's XBMC package.
Looking at the other "subforum" (as you call it), "Community Contributions",  the title below it is "A place for true innovation. Share your own created utilities with the Arch community."  Since the XBMC package comes from the Community Repo, it seemed like the place to put my topic.  It still seems like the place that it should go in.  If I am trying to get the attention of the XBMC package developer and the people who use Arch's Community XBMC package (my target audience for this problem) then "Community Contributions" is still the best subforum to get the problem noticed, and possible resolved.  Placing me in "Multimedia and Games" is definately not the right place to be, as XMBC is not a game nor is the issue multimedia based (i.e. faac/faad package based), but in fact a problem with how XBMC is creating / writing flac files.  I would still like my topic back in it's original subforum for best noticibility and results.
I have both enabled XBMC's logging and am monitoring it's output as I write this message, and am going to join the irc channel on freenode when I have more debug information.  I was however hoping to first get Arch's Community response as I'd hate to make mountains out of molehills.  But it seems I must dig really deep, as my topic isn't getting noticed as it's been moved from the proper subforum.
Jacob
Last edited by Jacob (2011-03-23 19:17:58)